But who should be on the hook for encouraging successful behaviors when it comes to these activities?  Should it be left up to the individual rep?  …the sales manager?  …a central training group?  …how about Marketing?

Common sense not only tells us that it is a critical combination of all of the above, but dictates that Marketing needs to play a critical role in just about all of the competencies for them to be successful.  Here’s our take:

Teaching (80% Marketing, 20% Sales)

Customers are looking to suppliers for insight—for knowledge and information that enables them to be more competitive by either saving money or making money in ways they hadn’t yet realized were possible.  To provide this to our customers, it requires a very specific organizational capability…one of commercial teaching.  And relying on the skill sets of individual reps to get this done isn’t enough here.  Marketing needs to lead the charge on commercial teaching, as we’re well positioned to scan the customer horizon and build this relevant pitch (vetted by Sales, of course).

Now, the big question is:  how do we not only make it relevant to the customer, but also still ensure that we are set up for a profitable relationship?  Well, the key to all of this is to uncover our differentiators (the things that our organization is uniquely positioned to provide) and then teach customers to value these things.  The marketing team at Volvo (commercial trucks division), working in conjunction with CVI (consultant), did this well.  They arrived at a narrow set of underappreciated differentiators (underappreciated by the customer) and then created a sales-ready message/pitch to teach these newly discovered differentiators to the customer.  This was accomplished through a 4-day “messaging workshop” consisting of cross-functional peers.   Click Here for the Volvo Example (see also: GE and Dow Chemical)

Tailoring (50% Marketing, 50% Sales)

Marketing should drive the activity here but needs to include sales partners, who have a lot of knowledge around individual customer stakeholders and what they care about (Click Here for an example from ARAMARK)

Asserting Control (mostly Sales, HR/Sales Training)

Development here typically takes the form of specific sales training led by HR or a “sales effectiveness”-type function internally – where the key learnings/takeaways are then reinforced in an ongoing manner through the sales management team.  That’s not to say that Marketing can’t play a role here – in fact, we’ve seen some marketers in the B2B space get heavily involved in figuring out what exactly we are willing (or not willing) to trade away during negotiations (what “negotiables” should/should not be on the table).

The work previously summarized is specifically designed to help senior sales executives prioritize investments in skill development broadly across the sales force assuming a finite amount of training dollars. In other words, what skill set improvement investments will give us the biggest bang for our buck?

Our guidance is to think about the five profiles like potential college majors – yes, everyone takes the core curriculum (science, math, etc), but everyone specializes as well. These profiles represent the different sales rep “majors” that exist.

Now, as we dig into these profiles, the relationship builders that we found are, in a sense, a “one trick pony” – squarely focused on building strong personal relationships across the customer organization, being likeable and generous with their time. This is very much a service mentality.

Regarding the challengers, the SEC’s work does not suggest that these reps don’t build strong relationships. In fact, the high-performer challengers found in the sample were above average on all of the “relationship building” attributes. They just don’t hang their hat on those attributes like a relationship builder would. Put another way, it’s not their major.

Instead, the challenger rep uses those relationships as a starting point to achieve a specific end. This rep wins by creating and maintaining a certain amount of constructive tension across the sale. They offer the customer unique perspectives – and communicate those perspectives with passion and precision in a way that draws the customer into a conversation.

It’s customer value (challenger approach) versus customer convenience (relationship builder).

Click Image to Enlarge | The Challenger profile is far more likely to be a high performer in a complex environment than any other profile.

Moreover, when we looked at the data through a different lens—the lens of deal complexity—we find something even more dramatic.  We went back to the data and divided up the high performers according to the complexity of the deals they were doing.  The bar on the left is the distribution of high performers selling relatively simple, stand-alone products (across a shorter sales cycle) and the bar on the right is the distribution of high performers selling complex bundles of products and solutions across a relatively longer sales cycle.  And if we focus on the “distribution of high performers” across the 5 profiles (as you move from the left bar to right) the challengers (the bottom slice of each bar) absolutely dominate —at well over 50% of the population.

Meanwhile, look what happens to the relationship builders as we move to a more complex environment (top slice of each bar in the illustration).  The likelihood that they achieve “star status” falls to nearly zero.  Reflecting on this page, it’s the perfect snapshot for why so many of us struggle with the migration to solution-selling.

What this tells us:  if we’re not buying or building challenger reps, chances are we’re going to come up short as our world becomes more complex.  These are the high performers we’re going to need to sell the more complex solutions many of us currently (or will eventually) rely on to survive.

We’ll discuss what we should be doing as marketers to support this high performer profile in an upcoming post.

• The Challenger (27% of the sample) – These reps are the debaters on the team.  They have a deep understanding of the customer’s business, and based on that insight, the Challenger rep is not afraid to assert his/her views…even if those views differ from the customer.
• The Relationship Builder (21% of the sample) – Sales reps that fall into this category have a tremendous service mentality.  They are adept at building and nurturing customer relationships by being highly accessible to the customer and responsive to needs.
• The Hard Worker (21% of the sample) – These are the folks that are always willing to go the extra mile.  These sales reps are self-motivated, nose to the grindstone, and don’t give up easily.  They run to feedback and seek out opportunities for improvement.
• The Lone Wolf (18% of the sample) – These reps are self-confident – they follow their own instincts instead of the rules.  We love them because they bring in the number – we hate them because they’re both hard to manage as well as hard to find.  These reps are probably best described as the prima donnas of your sales force.
• The Problem Solver (14% of the sample) – Detail-oriented reps that are reliable and naturally drawn to solving client issues (particularly the kinds of post-sales service issues that can really bog down a client relationship).

Who Wins? By far, the profile most associated with high performance is the Challenger profile.  Again, these are the reps that love to debate and use his/her deep understanding of a customer’s business to provide that customer with a different way of thinking about their business and how to compete.  In fact, when you dig into the data, they do three things well:

• Teach – Providing insight in the moment and teaching customers something new/valuable about how to compete in their market
• Tailor – Crafting the message being delivered to resonate with the customer’s specific priorities
• Assert Control – This does not mean be aggressive or abusive; this is about the ability and willingness of a sales rep to stand their ground when the customer begins to push back.

Who Doesn’t? Less than 10% of all-star performers fall into the Relationship Builder profile.  To be clear, the data doesn’t suggest that we shouldn’t have relationships with customers, but it tells us that building familiarity with your customers shouldn’t be your primary strategy for growing revenue.

Up next: we’ll look more specifically at the ramifications of all this for marketers.